“We? That’s not a great idea, Joan. I’m staying here.”
She stared at him, her expression a strained mixture of surprise, fear, and resentment. But then she said, “Of course. You’re right. You stay. I’ll be okay.”
She took out her cell phone. Cupping her hand over her suddenly very dry mouth, watching the Senator finish his scotch and swirl the leftover ice cubes at the bottom of his glass, she called Davey. The driver was just outside the grand flight of stairs at the front of the museum. He was one of the dozens of chauffeurs allowed to park their SUVs and limousines on the brick-inlaid plaza that stretched for three city blocks in front of the museum. The long and narrow fountains cast up walls of water in which festive lights shined.
“Davey,” she said, “I need to drive out to East Hampton tonight. Now.”
“Sure thing, Mrs. R.,” he said good-naturedly. It was as though she had told him she wanted to drive around the block. Large, beer-bellied, although sober for years, Davey still had an almost attractive, winsome Irish face. He was obedient, unquestioning, charming. “The car’s right here.”
8.
“We’re home, Mrs. R.” She didn’t stir. “We’re home,” Davey repeated.
Drugged by the champagne and Valium, she had slept for the last fifty miles of the one-hundred-twenty-mile drive. Davey had noticed, when he glanced from time to time into the rearview mirror as the Mercedes raced late at night along the empty Long Island Expressway, that when she slept Joan Richardson didn’t look as put-together and well cared for as she usually did: her head leaned too far back against the head rest, her mouth was wide open, her legs were splayed out.
“We’re home,” he said again, louder. Waking, disoriented, she pulled her hair back off her face, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them. For a moment, she didn’t seem to know where she was or have any sense of what was happening. But then she focused: the country road in front of her home was blocked by yards of glistening yellow tape with the words “Police Line” repeated endlessly.
She opened the rear window of the Mercedes. Chilly air laden with mist washed over her face, a wave of relief. All around her were police cars with lights crazily revolving. Floodlights starkly illuminated the lawn like a movie set at night. Everything was ash white, a moonscape. It was well past midnight.
The tiny eyelets of at least a dozen digital cameras pulsed brightly as soon as she stepped out of the car. The cameras stunned her. She raised her hands defensively. With Davey trying to fend off the reporters from The East Hampton Star, Southampton Press, and local television and radio stations that had already been alerted to the killing of Brad Richardson, she hesitated at the police tape that surrounded her home.
Soon a man in a sports jacket and regimental striped tie, an identification tag hanging from a ribbon draped around his neck, walked toward her. “Mrs. Richardson?” he asked. She nodded.
He raised the gleaming tape high enough for her to walk under it. “I’m Detective Halsey. I’m the guy who called you.” His head was completely shaven.
Following her, Davey bent to pass under the tape. Halsey’s voice was not pleasant: “Wait a minute, fella. And who are you?”
“The driver.”
“You stay here.”
Joan Richardson glanced at him. “It’s all right, Davey.”
As soon as she entered the house, she saw men and women in police uniforms and emergency worker garb crowding the wide entryway. For her it was chaotic, almost otherworldly.
“Don’t touch anything,” Halsey said. “And keep walking right behind me.” His voice had an edge of rudeness, not at all deferential.
When she realized they were walking through the long hallway toward Brad’s office-his sanctuary, his special place, the center of his world-she sensed her knees and legs weakening, as though her bones were turning to dust.
From the open doorway to the office she saw what first struck her as black oil spread over the bare wooden floor. It took the beat of a moment or two until she recognized, to her right, lying uncovered side by side, the bodies of Felix and Sylvia. They were not, she saw, whole bodies. Their heads were gone.
Joan Richardson threw up: she tasted the now-vile canapés, shiitake mushrooms, and sushi she had eaten four hours earlier in the civilized interior of the Met. Instinctively she bent forward so that her vomit wouldn’t spill over her dress and shoes. At the sight of what had come out of her, she vomited again; her body shook uncontrollably. A sweet-faced black woman in a green uniform, an emergency worker, handed her a towel. Joan Richardson wiped her mouth and face. The woman extended a bottle of water toward her. She waved it away. She wanted never to put anything in her body again.
As if other people’s vomiting was an everyday event for him, Halsey said, “He’s over there.”
Alongside the old-style wooden chair Brad always used-it was now tipped over, utterly transformed-was his body. She saw the white slacks, leather shoes, no socks, and his thin virtually hairless ankles. A white canvas was spread over the rest of his body.
Halsey said, “That’s your husband’s body, isn’t it, Mrs.Richardson?”
Joan Richardson put her hands over her face, bent forward, and vomited again. This time she couldn’t keep her dress or shoes clean: the vomit spilled over them.
She was struggling to cover her face while she threw up. Tears streamed from her eyes as if stung by tear gas. Her face was red, contorted. When she ran her hands through her hair they left trails of vomit and spit. Halsey didn’t move. Finally, the woman in the green uniform began wiping Joan Richardson’s face and hair with a wet towel, using the practiced gestures of a mother cleaning a five-year-old who has taken a fall into dirt and bruised herself. Joan let herself be cleaned, even comforted.
After Joan had settled somewhat-her crying stopped, her face was as clean as wiping with towels could make it-Bo Halsey said, “Can you follow me, Mrs. Richardson, for just a second?”
She nodded, speechlessly, and walked behind him to the door. She felt stripped down and utterly vulnerable. There was no artifice to her. Appearances didn’t matter. She stumbled slightly. Halsey turned. He took her arm. It wasn’t a gentle grip. In the hallway just outside the office, he stopped. “I know this is hard,” he said.
She shook her head up and down, a quick gesture relaying the unspoken words, It is, it is.
“Let me just cut to the chase right now for a second. I need to know some things right now. The guy who did this might not be far away, understand? Can you tell me anything about how this happened?”
Her whole body was shaking, as if overcome by a sudden fever. “Everybody loved Brad.”
He repeated, “Do you know anything about how this happened?”
Her eyes were wide open, the same startling blue as always, even though there were jagged red streaks all converging on the irises. She was struggling to understand, as though Halsey were speaking an unknown language. “What do you mean?” she asked, hearing the tremor in her own voice so unlike the confident, clear resonance it usually had.
“What do I mean? Your husband is dead, Mrs. Richardson. Do you know anything about how that happened?”
Now she understood. She quickly shook her head, the universal signal for no, no, no.
“Has anyone threatened him?”
“No, never.”
“Who has access to this house? Who can get in?”
“Many people. Brad makes friends with everyone. This is like an open house.”
“Can you think of anything that’s valuable that anyone might have wanted to take from the house?”
She waved her right arm, a gesture that meant Everything, everything is valuable.
“Think about money,” Halsey said. “Money was taken from his pockets. They’re ripped open, some change was spilled over the floor, with one or two dollar bills. All the drawers in his desk were ransacked. All the furniture in the room is broken because whoever did this thought there was cash.”